Free What Dread Hand? by Christianna Brand Page B

his room, mine in mine.’
    ‘And no chance of its getting mixed up?’ said Inspector Cockrill. He fixed Fred with that beady eye of his. ‘This could be important.’
    Fred, of course, was maintaining the mutual-accusation arrangement we’d agreed upon. ‘Not a chance, sir,’ he said a bit too eagerly.
    I wasn’t going to be left out. I said: ‘Not the slightest.’
    ‘That’s right, sir,’ says the sergeant. ‘The old lady confirms it.’
    ‘Good,’ said Cockrill. He gave a few orders and the sergeant went away. People were still buzzing about, up in our bedrooms. ‘I’m coming,’ called up the Inspector, to someone at the head of the stairs. He turned back to us. ‘All right, Cain and Abel,’ he said, ‘I’ll leave you to stew in it. But in a day or two, as the song says, “I’ll be seeing you.” And when I do, it’ll be at short notice. So stick around, won’t you?’
    ‘And if we don’t?’ I said. ‘You’ve got nothing against us, you can’t charge us; you’ve got no call to be giving us orders.’
    ‘Who’s giving orders?’ he said. ‘Just a little advice. But before you ignore the advice—take a good, hard, look at yourselves. You won’t need any mirrors. And ask yourselves,’ he said, giving us a good, hard, long look on his own account, from the soles of our feet to the tops of our flaming red heads, ‘just how far you’d get…’
    So that was that; and for the next two days, we ‘stewed in it’: David and Jonathan, Cain and Abel—like he’d said, blood brothers.
    On the third day, he sent for us, to Heronsford police station. They shoved Fred into one little room and me in another. He talked to Fred first, and I waited. All very chummy, fags and cups of tea and offers of bread and butter: but it was the waiting…
    Long after I knew I couldn’t stand one more minute of it, he came. I suppose they muttered some formalities, but I don’t remember: Fred and I might hate one another, and by this time we did, well and truly, there’s no denying it—but it was worse, a thousand times worse, without him there. My head felt as though it were filled with grey cotton-wool, little stuffy, warm clouds of it. He sat down in front of me. He said: ‘Well—have you come to your senses? Of course you killed her?’
    ‘If anyone killed her,’ I said, clinging to our patter, ‘it must have been him.’
    ‘Your brother?’ he said. ‘But why should your brother have killed her?’
    ‘Well,’ I says, ‘if the girl was having a baby—’
    ‘A baby?’ he says, surprised; and his eyes got that bright, glittering look in them. He said after a minute of steady thinking: ‘But she wasn’t.’
    ‘She wasn’t?’ I said. ‘She wasn’t? But she’d told him—’
    Or hadn’t she told him? Something, like an icicle of light, ice-cold, piercing, brilliant, thrust itself into the dark places of my cotton-wool mind. I said: The bloody, two-timing, double-crossing bastard…!’
    ‘He didn’t seem,’ said the Inspector, softly, ‘to expect her to have been found pregnant.’
    So that was it! So that was it! So as to get me to agree to the killing, to get me to assist with it… I ought to have been more fly—why should Fred, of all people, be so much afraid of Black Will as to go in for murder? Will’s a dangerous man, but Fred’s not exactly a softie… The icicle turned in my mind and twisted, probing with its light-rays into the cotton-woolliness. Revenge! Cold, sullen, implacable revenge upon the two of us—because Lydia had come to me: because I had taken her. Death for her: and I to be the accomplice in her undoing—in my own undoing. And for me… I knew now who had sent the anonymous note about the hit-and-run accident: so easily to be ‘traced’ (after she was dead) to Lydia.
    But yet—he was as deep in it, as I was: deeper, had he but known it. I said, fighting my way up out of the darkness: ‘Even if she had been pregnant, it wouldn’t have been my fault.